Today is a day that we take time aside to thank our dads for raising us with love, laughter and an eye on the thermostat. Because I live so far away from my own father, I struggled to think of something special that I could give to him across the geographical distance besides a phone call and an “I love you” scrawled in a drug store card.

I pride myself in giving good gifts – not costly trinkets, but something that shows I know about the person receiving the gift, that I care deeply about him or her. I’d done the writing a poem thing in the past and didn’t want to be redundant. So, my father, who was always sitting under his reading lamp in an arm chair, hours after I was in bed every night when I was a kid, received from me this year a list. A list of books that I have loved through the years and know he will love too. These are the books that I recommended to my father, an inquisitive, loving, sometimes-serious Nova Scotian living in the prairies.